Today, I am thrilled to have this opportunity to welcome Guest Author Sherilyn Powers. Sherilyn is a wonderfully supportive member of Rave Reviews Book Club and she is a native of Canada. After getting to know her a little bit I discovered that I would be hosting her and that made it that much more exciting. A plus is that I can personally relate to her story. And now here she is…

Discovering Your Allergies
Have you ever had someone, like a doctor or nutritionist, ask you what you had for breakfast and not be able to remember?

With our hectically frantic lives, many of us can’t remember what we were doing a short time ago, never mind some time before taking the kids to school and daycare, running back home to pick up a lunch someone forgot, the four meetings with your boss, clients, co-workers and the plumber who was called in to your house by the neighbours when your pipes bursting flooded their basement.

This is why when trying to discover what types of allergic symptoms may be affecting you and their causes can be practically impossible without keeping track physically. If we can’t think of what we had for breakfast this morning, how are we going to remember everything we encountered three days earlier?

Yes, three days. Delayed reactions can take up to 72 hours to show up and in the case of some substances (medical contrast dye) even up to seven days!

In my book, I’m Not Crazy… I’m Allergic! I discuss journaling in more detail and why it is important to help you start finding your triggers. Even if you are able to go in for all the different allergy testing, journaling is still your best bet for confirming exactly what affects you and how.

Tracking daily routines, foods, environments and symptoms can seem rather daunting when you first start, but it is one of the things that helps me identify immediately when something is wrong and what it is. After you have established a safe daily routine that creates no reactions, make sure that if you want to stray that you only stray with one variable at a time. Ie. Eating at McDonalds. If that is unusual and you get sick, it’s pretty easy to pick apart what you ate and narrow down the possible culprits. If you are eating questionable items all the time, you will never pinpoint what is giving you issues.

Luckily the man, Thomas Christiansen, was a software programmer and developed his own way to keep track. His app, Mymee app , helped him track a variety of things to help build his case on what he was reacting to and when.

We can’t all develop our own tracking software, and some of us can’t afford fancy gadgets, but pens and paper are available in most areas. Whatever method you use for tracking your symptoms and possible triggers, make sure to include dates, times, foods, environments (home, work, restaurant, farmer’s field), as well as things like mood, pain, sneezing, mucus production and general feeling of well-being – or not.

Tracking these things for a month or two may not give you any startling revelations, but as you do start to notice things you possibly react to and remove or limit them, the knowledge from journaling can snowball.

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About Shirley Harris-Slaughter

I love old buildings and history. That's why I ended up writing about the history that surrounded me all of my life - "Our Lady of Victory, the Saga of an African-American Catholic Community." Plus our church had closed and the school is torn down, so I felt it was imperative that we preserve the history or it would be lost forever.

35 Responses to CONGRATULATIONS #RRBC SHERILYN POWERS!!

Great post Shirley and Sherilyn. I have a house full of people with strange allergies from mint and carrots to dust! It’s not easy to find the triggers. My daughter’s dust allergy led to years of chronic asthma and she had antibiotics practically every month for two years which was a nightmare for her immune system. Thankfully she’s growing out of it now and we avoid as many of the things that she is intolerant or allergic too as often as we can.

Writing everything down is a great way to work out where the allergy is coming from. Some of our triggers were bananas, melon, orange juice and the spray of juice you get from opening oranges! Apparently this can cause asthmatics to cough. Who’d have guessed that!

Lizzie, I found milk to be the main culprit in my suffering of chronic sinus drips, congestion /headaches, migraines, frequent bladder infections, lactose intolerence, and on and on. When I eliminated milk out my diet all my symptoms disappeared. Have you looked into milk products? It can lead to asthmatic conditions because milk is a mucus producing product and it clings to your lungs. Too many children are now suffering with it. Plus in America, they put growth hormones and all kinds of stuff in dairy animals so I go organic and have to watch everything I and my family eat. I told my son and he is doing the same thing. I belong to organizations now that are watching what our representatives are doing and holding them accountable. Sherilynn says when kids grow out of it, it just means their body has adapted to it but not necessarily in a good way. I wish you well and keep tracking.

Thanks Shirley. She doesn’t have a lactose intolerance, thank goodness. That must be a nightmare to avoid. We did all of the blood and allergy tests including removing many things from her diet when she was little. We found the triggers were banana, melon and chocolate, which was hard for a small child who loved fruit and chocolate cupcakes at parties. Once we removed all of these from her diet completely, she improved dramatically. I will certainly be buying organic milk from now on though. Thanks for the tip!

Yes NJ and Liz, who would think that a fruit could do all this? But have you thought about how it was grown? Did they add pesticides to the crop? I bet your daughter is reacting to the poisons put on the crop. At least here in the US that would be something to look at. Try to get organic crops if you can.

This is a really interesting post! I’ve often wondered if I have allergies but I haven’t been able to isolate the culprit yet – maybe I should start tracking? Great advice and the book sounds really interesting 🙂

Sherilyn, you have taught us so much in a short span of time. Our late, Kathryn C. Treat suffered from allergies and other things in her surroundings that most of us take for granted. If you haven’t, please check out her book “ALLERGIC TO LIFE,” and share it with Julie as well. Kathryn is not here with us in the physical any longer, but her book is still in our catalog and her memory is alive and well here at RRBC. She is no longer ALLERGIC TO LIFE. God bless her.

Sherilyn, I think that many will benefit from your book. Great tour! Shirley, as always, one of our very trusted and reliable hosts! Thank you!

Thank you Nonnie! I have checked her book out, and it saddens me that I never got a chance to meet her. I’m sure we would have had lots of stories to share! Thank you for all your hard work and support, this blog tour has been a lot of fun!

I think a good first step is for our government to stop spraying our crops with dangerous pesticides because it is having a detrimental affect on the population. I suffered from food allergies and that doesn’t just happen to people. Thanks all of you for stopping by and adding to this conversation.

There is some evidence to support that so-called third world countries don’t have the same problem with allergies/sensitivities… things that make you go “hmmmm”. Thank you for the warm welcome Shirley!

You are right Sherilyn, tracking is very important when one needs to know how the body behavior changed. Because I listen to my body all the time, I could very easily know when my body is warning me about something.Sometimes, it is my brain that will warn me first, about eating a particular food. If I go ahead and eat it, my body will react. I find that quite strange. 😦 Thank you Shirley for hosting her.

I find it interesting to watch children. At 5 my daughter loved broccoli and hated whipped cream. We found out later she had a dairy allergy we thought she had “outgrown” at 2. She knew much better than we did what was good for her! Thank you for stopping by Joy!

Sherilyn, have you also noticed that when children are young they don’t like the hamburger on the bun and usually eat it alone. Meat & bread is incompatible with the body. Maybe they also know something there too.